In 1878 the painter James McNeill Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin for libel. Ruskin had accused him of ‘‘Cockney impudence’’ for asking ‘‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’’ Among the issues at the trial were the degree of finish required in a painting and its status as representation. Of his Nocturne in Blue and Silver exhibited before the jury, Whistler averred, ‘‘It was not my intent simply to make a copy of Battersea Bridge. ...As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it.’’ Questioned by one of the defense counsels about the precise contents of the picture, Whistler replied with evident irony:
- Are those figures on the top of the bridge intended as people?
- They are just what you like.
- That is a barge beneath?
- Yes, I am very much flattered at your seeing that.
‘‘My whole scheme,’’ Whistler insisted, ‘‘was only to bring about a certain harmony of color’’ (Merrill 1992: 151). We have here what might be called a
Late nineteenth-century version of reception theory. The unconventional title of Whistler’s picture can be seen as a provocation, encouraging the viewer to cooperate with the painter in performing, so to say, an interpretation of the work, one that ‘‘depends on who looks at it.’’ Whistler was an avant-garde artist, but for centuries art theory had expected beholders to play an active role in responding to works of art. A concern with reception was not the invention of critical theorists in the 1960s. Indeed we might trace the modern phase to the ‘‘Copernican’’ shift advocated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant from the ‘‘thing-in-itself’’ to the thing as it appears to the minds and senses of human beings (which is, for Kant, all we can know).
The word ‘‘reception,’’ however, in the specialized sense used within literary theory, is particularly associated with a group of German critics led by Hans Robert Jauss (died 1997) and Wolfgang Iser who worked together at the University of Constance from the 1960s; it often replaces terms like ‘‘tradition,’’ ‘‘heritage,’’ ‘‘influence,’’ and so forth. Each of these keywords carries within it its own implied agenda and metaphorical entailments; each to some extent determines in advance its different ‘‘findings.’’ The etymology of‘‘tradition,’’ for example, from the Latin tradere suggests a - usually benign - handing down of material from the past to the present. ‘‘Reception,’’ by contrast, at least on the model of the Constance school, operates with a different temporality, involving the active participation of readers (including readers who are themselves creative artists) in a two-way process, backward as well as forward, in which the present and past are in dialogue with each other. When texts are reread in new situations, they have new meanings; we do not have to privilege the meanings that they had in their first, ‘‘original’’ contexts (even assuming these to be recoverable in principle). The distinction between the ancient world ‘‘in itself’’ and the way it has been received and understood in later centuries is thereby blurred, or even dissolved. But the boundary between ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘reception‘‘ is itself a shifting one, varying with the usage and practices of different writers. Many reception histories are highly positivistic in character (seeking to construct the-past-as-it-really-was-in-itself), while, half a century before Jauss first articulated his ‘‘aesthetics of reception’’ in his inaugural lecture at Constance in 1967, T. S. Eliot had argued, in the influential essay ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ that ‘‘the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’’ (Eliot 1920: 45), a cardinal principle for many versions of reception. Thus merely by putting a citation from Petronius as an epigraph to The Waste Land, Eliot changed the character of the Satyricon, rendering it modern again, indeed modernist (Kermode 2004: 77). My concern in this chapter is with the challenge reception theory in its classic form (whose roots can be traced back well beyond 1967) poses to what Jauss calls the ‘‘dogmatic historicism and positivism’’ (Segers 1979: 84) that still marks much of the scholarship describing the presence of antiquity in later centuries.
An example should make clearer some of the points at issue. Ben Jonson’s ‘‘On My First Daughter’’ (22 in his Epigrams published in 1616) is an ‘‘imitation’’ (to use the term favored by the humanists) of an often-admired epigram by Martial (5.34) commemorating the dead slave girl Erotion:
Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet, all heaven’s gift being heaven’s due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months’ end she parted hence With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul Heaven’s Queen (whose name she bears),
In comfort of her mother’s tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin train;
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth - Which cover lightly, gentle earth.
Various elements (a father and a mother, mention of the age of the dead girl, her destiny in the afterlife, the concluding prayer to the earth) have been taken from Martial, while intractably Roman detail is omitted, including the picture of tiny Erotion, afraid, like many children, of the dark and recoiling from the huge dog Cerberus (a detail perhaps playful as well as sad, in view of the skepticism, at this date, about mythological accounts of the afterlife). Martial concludes with the traditional request that the earth should not lie heavy on the dead, a topos which has a special gracefulness in a poem about a child:
Mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa nec illi, terra, gravis fueris: non fuit illa tibi.
(let not the hard clods cover her soft bones,
And do not be heavy on her, earth - she was not so on you)
Jonson, reverting at the close to the small grave where his baby daughter is buried, gives this motif a Christian twist: Mary Jonson’s soul is now in heaven, so only her tiny body is left under the earth. Out of Martial has come a fresh and English creation. A traditional account might say that Martial’s poem (taken to have a fixed character which scholarship has determined) has influenced Jonson’s (likewise so taken). But that is to make the hermeneutic process seem unduly straightforward, for both Jonson and us. We might rather say that Jonson, in writing his own poem, was trying to find out what sort of a poet Martial is, constructing him and his tone of voice, so to say. Writing of Jonson, Eliot observes that ‘‘to see him as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our London: a more difficult triumph of divination’’ (Eliot 1920: 97). This is what Jonson, it may be claimed, did with Martial. The epigram could then be seen as providing a possible reading of Martial, one that we might accept or contest (some scholars question the seriousness of Martial’s grief, citing in evidence another, rather more cynical epigram about Erotion, 5.37). The critic H. A. Mason, asking whether Martial is still in any sense a living classic, examines a variety of translations and imitations to see what kind of life might be found there (his conclusion is that Martial is alive in the work of Jonson and Cowley, but not in versions from the immediate postwar period). In particular he argues that ‘‘On My First Daughter,’’ ‘‘as the best translation to date of the spirit of the epitaph on Erotion,’’ brings us ‘‘nearer to the humanity of Martial’’ (Mason 1988: 309 - we should note, however, that this formulation reifies the ‘‘spirit’’ of the epigram). In other words, Mason uses Jonson and others as a way, indeed the best way, of exploring the character of Martial’s poetry; we have then (Martindale reading) Mason reading Jonson reading Martial. Any imitation, as a sort of extended allusion, invites a reader to make another text part of her reading. Such intertextuality never merely resolves meaning; rather there is a dialectic of difference and similarity between the two texts, which is constantly reconfigured in new ways by new readers (Martindale 2000). When in my turn I read Jonson’s epitaph, I become part of a three-way conversation between myself, Jonson, and Martial (with indeed numerous other more ghostly voices - past critics and readers including Mason, other intertexts - contributing to that conversation, many of them unrecognized by myself). And my account becomes a further link, however small, in what Jauss calls the ‘‘chain of receptions’’ (1982: 20). This chain is both enabling and constraining, as we make meanings intersubjectively, but not in circumstances of our own making (clearly there are readings that are unlikely, or impossible, within particular historical contexts). So, like the other ancient auctores. Martial (or should that be ‘‘Martial’’?), as a man, as a body of texts, as an authority for different ways of living, has been diversely read in the West over the last two thousand years, by scholars, poets, and others, and our current images are shaped in response to that reception history.
Some complain that ‘‘reception’’ suggests a passive role for the reader (this may in part reflect the other associations of the word in English) and prefer ‘‘appropriation’’ (e. g., Hall 2004: 61). But we should remember that ‘‘reception’’ was adopted precisely to underline the dynamic and dialogic character of reading (indeed ‘‘appropriation,’’ making one’s own, downplays the possibility of dialogue, the capacity of the text to resist our attempts to master it, its capacity to modify our sensibility). ‘‘Tradition,’’ by contrast, might imply that the process of transmission is comfortably uncontested. But readers can certainly be resistant, or antagonistic, or conflicted, as Tony Harrison’s poem ‘‘Me Tarzan’’ reminds us:
Outside the whistled gang-call, Twelfth Street Rag, then a Tarzan yodel for the kid who’s bored, whose hand’s on his liana... no, back to Labienus and his flaming sword.
Offlaikin’ then t’fish ’oil all the boys, off tartin’, off to t’flicks but on, on, on, the foldaway card table, the green baize, De Bello Gallico and lexicon.
It’s only his jaw muscles that he’s tensed into an enraged shit that he can’t go;
Down with polysyllables, he’s against all pale-face Caesars, for Geronimo.
He shoves the frosted attic skylight, shouts:
Ah bloody can’t ah’vegorra Latin prose.
His bodiless head that’s poking out’s like patriarchal Cissy-bleeding-ro’s.
Both the older Harrison (left-wing, anti-establishment) who writes the poem and his younger self depicted in it are divided in their response to the oppressive power of the classics (Rutter 1995: 127-8). The poem pits high culture (linked with Caesar and Cicero) against popular culture, and it works with three languages: Yorkshire dialect, Latin (associated with polysyllables like ‘‘patriarchal’’), and standard English (in which most of the poem is written, and which, like the orthodox meter and rhyme-scheme, would seem to some quite as hegemonic as Latin). The clash of these languages generates various puns and plays. At one level ‘‘flaming’’ is a colloquialism, but it also suggests the sword of an epic hero ( fulmineus is used in the Aeneid of Aeneas’ sword), or the angelic sword that keeps Adam and Eve out of Paradise (and if the poem depicts a fall, is it a fortunate fall?). ‘‘Cissy-bleeding-ro’’ (bloody Cicero) is an unmanly pale-face in comparison with the ‘‘redskin’’ Geronimo (is education then gendered, and, if so, is this not incipient patriarchy in the boys?), but he is also the Roman statesman who bravely stuck his head out of the litter to receive his death blow. And, like his younger self, Harrison, despite his working class origins, in part resembles Cicero, a writer, set apart; and he is also by training a classicist, who has made a career by repeated turns to ancient literature - indeed this very poem is full of classical learning and allusions. But ‘‘Me Tarzan’’ reminds us that, even so, Harrison remains highly ambivalent about classical values (though ironically aspects of his ‘‘popular’’ culture will be almost unintelligible to many readers). Readers don’t necessarily do what they are told, or respond as they are meant to.
Most versions of reception theory start from a proposition previously advanced within German hermeneutics, for example by Hans-Georg Gadamer in one of the last century’s most profound philosophical explorations of the nature of literary understanding, Truth and Method, published in 1960, and translated into English in 1975. This is the claim that interpretation always takes place within history, and is subject to the contingencies of its historical moment; there is no God’s-eye position for the interpreter outside history. Indeed ‘‘history’’ itself cannot provide a stable ground for interpretation, since it is always differently understood, though history and theory can be used productively to interrogate each other. There is no permanently ‘‘correct’’ reading of a text, but an ever-changing ‘‘fusion of horizons’’ (in Gadamer’s somewhat awkward metaphor) between text and interpreter. There can be no final reading since that would imply that we have come to the end of history: ‘‘our knowledge of the past... is limited by our knowledge (or ignorance) of the future’’ (Danto 1965: 18). Writing from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, Iser sees reception theory as a response to the conflict of interpretations, one that helps to ‘‘elucidate why and how the same literary text can mean different things to different people at different times’’ (Iser 2006: 68). He locates two main strands within that theory, both of which are needed for a fully developed account of reading and interpretation. The first is represented by his own work, which is concerned with reading as a process in relation to formal features of the text, including gaps in the text that a reader has to fill (his ‘‘implied reader’’ is thus a transcendental or virtual construct, not to be identified with any actual reader either now or in the past). Within this model ‘‘meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced’’ (Iser 1980: 10). Iser’s second strand derives from the work of his colleague Jauss, who sought a revival of literary history, and was concerned with documented historical readers and what they can tell us about the texts we read. Jauss’s ‘‘aesthetics of reception’’ attempts to reconcile hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation) with poetics, historical with aesthetic criticism. In the notes to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope observed that the commentators were ‘‘fonder of showing their learning in all kinds than their single understanding in poetry’’ (Shankman 1996: 46). But if the Iliad was produced in the past, it is valued (or not) in the present; an adequate account, if it is not to be of merely antiquarian interest, needs to attend to both aspects. Past works have the power to act in the present (any present of reading) in ways that could not have been foreseen at the time. Following Gadamer’s dialectical approach, Jauss breaks down the barrier between the art object and the perceiving subject: the reader experiences ‘‘self-enjoyment in the enjoyment of something other.’’ His version of reception thus ‘‘entails not only the introduction of the reader as a guide to value and interpretation, but implicitly a model for understanding encounters with the past in which we simultaneously form and are formed by artefacts’’ (Holub 1995: 344, 326). Hostile critics sometimes link reception with the consumerism characteristic of late capitalism. But reception does not claim that the customer is always right, just that she is always a party to the transaction. Validity remains an issue for reception scholars, as for other interpreters (indeed since criteria of validity are historically situated and always in dispute, they can themselves be seen as a crucial part of the processes of reception).
Why should we study previous readers? Jauss’s metaphor of the ‘‘chain’’ reaching us from the work could suggest a way of doing reception history rather different from the norm, one that explores historical filiations without privileging original meaning. We could say that reception theory, while stressing the importance of history, also destabilizes or complicates it as a site of meaning. We usually get flat accounts in which each ‘‘age’’ encounters the past in isolation rather as though it were a tabula rasa (so the ‘‘Romantic’’ view of Vergil becomes quite other than the ‘‘Augustan’’ view). But much of the history of reading will be unknowable and subject to multiple contingencies; good accounts will acknowledge the difficulties and aporias and blind-spots of any such project, including the complex entanglements of history. It is no advance simply to substitute positivistic accounts of the text-in-itself by equally positivistic accounts of the historical-reading-of-the-text-in-itself; if the Aeneid has no single ‘‘originary’’ meaning, subsequent readings are equally subject to the slide in signification, in accordance inter alia with the particular needs and configurations of changing reading practices. To cope with this we might try to devise accounts that are not hierarchically arranged, but in which any text could speak to any other text on terms of equality (I shall shortly offer an extended illustration). Thus we might approach Vergil obliquely through Dante, say, or Homer through the Romantics, remembering that we too are involved in these layerings (we can call this ‘‘double-distancing’’). The classicist and aesthetic critic Walter Pater (1839-94), another, perhaps unexpected, forerunner of reception theory, may best point the way to a revised practice (see Iser 1995; Martindale 2005; introduction to Martindale and Thomas 2006). Too often reception histories present us merely with quaint practices or the errors we have outgrown. The assumption is that such receptions tell us only about the receiving culture, little or nothing about the work received (though we tend to exclude our own receptions from these strictures, particularly if we are scholars). Rather than patronizing our predecessors, we might do better to put our minds into productive friction with other minds in our contemplation of past works. A reception history need not be part of a narrative of progress; we might be the learners.
World History
